This is when the 'Golden Age of Gaming' gets into gear.

Some great stuff in 1995. Yoshi's Island, Warcraft II, Dark Forces (Dark Forces should've been in the main poll in my opinion, ahead of like, Twisted Metal or something) and Caesar II were my favourites. Command & Conquer of course, I played that some as well. Then there's Donkey Kong Country, which like the first one didn't fully click with me but is obviously good. Chrono Trigger which like Final Fantasy wasn't a thing in Europe so I didn't know it existed but that is lauded of course.

Still, even with a whole bunch of all-time favourites in this year this is an easy choice for me. Warcraft II and Dark Forces would've won most other years for me, but Yoshi's Island is if you asked me the greatest 2D-Platformer ever made, and the number 4 on my all-time Top 50. It is brilliant with perfect platforming, absolutely gorgeous and still one of the prettiest games in existence.

So yeah, Yoshi's Island.

Chrono Trigger, no question.

Yeah see 'blame the user' culture is exactly why I'm leaving Windows behind. I can do a fresh install of Windows, do all the updates again and hope it comes out better, but I'm not going to spend time on that nonsense anymore. I generally keep my installation mean and lean, remove everything I don't need right at the start and uninstall everything I don't use anymore. Always make sure I have plenty disk space free on both system and data disks, got 32GB RAM plenty for the OS not to have any issues. Still there are always problems.
With win 10 I had my screen not willing to turn off anymore for months, which finally fixed itself after trying dozens of suggestions from the web without any luck. Now it's the opposite and often the screen won't wake up and I have to hard reset my laptop to get a picture again. (Mouse and Keyboard turn back on, screen remains black) Basically boot from cold to fix it. Then I had a long streak of a mandatory update failing with a useless error code. I have searched for weeks for a solution, nothing worked. Every restart, finishing updates... 96%, something went wrong, 5 minutes undoing changes before it came alive again. So eventually I cleaned out the update cache and disabled windows update.

I'm not worried about compatibility, I'm worried about stability and longevity. And Windows doesn't have that.

I don't know if Mac is better but taking 24 hours to copy the 120GB of pictures of my wife's iPhone in small batches (to back up), can't be worse on Mac... Dunno what Windows does but I every time I have to copy in small batches as selecting multiple directories or even one of the bigger ones just leaves Windows calculating remaining time to copy for a long time to then give up copying after 10 minutes. Not to mention the pita it is every time to get Windows and iPhone working together. Some weird sequence, having to start iTunes multiple times, rebooting my laptop and phone all in the right order before iPhone allows access and Windows actually sees the data directories on iPhone. User Experience 1/10.

I've been on MS live chat support for other issues which usually takes hours. They do help and go through a lot with remote desktop control, but often also can't find a full solution and kinda agree Windows sucks... It's great when your support technicians have little faith in the product and just try random things hopingn to find something out of order. The built in troubleshooters are a joke.

iPhone so far has managed to survive my wife lol. She doesn't leave a single byte free on her phone and has to make room for updates. See what happens to Windows when you fill up the system drive... My wife does the 'maintenance' for her parents' PC. That requires intervention on a near monthly basis. They let the system drive get too full once, what a nightmare. But usually it's them clicking on the wrong things and turning the browsers into a mess or something gone wrong again with their MS account on the PC. (My kids use that PC as well and Windows is not kid proof) I do the maintenance for my kids, well one now, the oldest one already switched to Mac and hasn't needed any help since!

And BTW, yes now Windows 95 and 98 are 'complete' with lots of resources available now. It was a PITA at the time, with DirectX and OpenGL still being new, needing lots of updates and having lots of compatibility issues with the various early graphics cards which didn't have all their driver updates yet either. Some games simply wouldn't start, some crashed a lot. Alt-Tab had many problems, likely leading to a crash or like Everquest, input still ending up in the game while typing in Messenger.

Things are better nowadays, I 'only' had to restart FS2020 109 times during my Covid world tour. Which comes down to about once every 24h of run time. (It was a long tour with lots of auto pilot) Mostly due to memory issues. Yet still a long way to go.

Tough choice between Chrono Trigger and Yoshi's Island - two of my most favorite games and in my top 10 on the SNES.

I vote for Chrono Trigger because its timeless.

Have to go with others and says its Tekken 2 its one of the best sequels ever and one of the best early PS1 games.

Another great year of games, but Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time, so this is the easiest choice of any year.

#1 Chrono Trigger

#2 Terranigma

#3 DKC2

#4 Suikoden

Two of my top 10 favourite games of all time came out on this list with Chrono Trigger and Terranigma.

Not much to say about this one which won’t already be said. Chrono Trigger is what I’d consider the best designed RPG of the 1990s and my second favourite game of the 1990s, the first favourite is a bit of a spiritual successor to both Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6: Tetsuya Takahashi’s Xenogears.

Terranigma is one of my favourite action games of all time, in fact, as far as action RPGs go, it remains my #2 of all time (next wto Witcher 3) and would have been #1 most years of the 1990s, it just happened to come out the same year as Chrono Trigger, my second favourite game released in the 1990s. Terranigma is my third favourite game of the 1990s.

Terranigma is also the final game I bought for the 16-but generation (or second final, I think Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons came out after).

Damn, I forgot about Terranigma. Thanks for the reminder. Amazing game!

Oh yeah, I can't believe I mentioned Solar Eclipse but forgot to mention D before! Although I liked Solar Eclipse better, D was another of the first sound FMV games I played and enjoyed. 1995 was kind of peak 3DO in terms of the better titles released for the system. It was also the year of Gex, which launched first for the 3DO, for instance. Not that there was really any especially great year to be a 3DO owner.

Personally, I think I'd go with Super Metroid, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Celeste, Hollow Knight, Braid, and maybe even Rayman Legends and a few others over Diddy's Kong Quest. Still, when it came to linear platforming platforming games released up to that point in time at least, I would say Diddy's Kong Quest was my favorite too. The big controversy around it was the lack of a playable Donkey Kong, but I found it much more fun to have two equally nimble monkeys to play as instead, and found Dixie's hair-spin move indispensable. Also much enjoyed the heightened level of challenge on offer (as by this time I was something of a platforming veteran; platformers having been really the biggest game genre of the age), the existence of a hidden world you could gain access to (which gave you an actual reason to explore off the beaten path), the new Kongs (especially the replacement of Candy Kong with Wrinkly, to be frank), the fun pirate theme, the richer graphics with all the glowing gold and stuff, and above all the soundtrack. Seriously, Diddy's Kong Quest has one of the very best soundtracks ever to exist in a video game for my taste. It's ridiculously engrossing! Such a cartoony game had no right to feel that immersive! When you add onto that the continuation of the first game's biggest breakthrough, the actually functional two-player co-op system, which was the best in gaming at the time, it made for a the all-around best entry in the classic DKC trilogy and the best linear platforming game of the era, in my personal opinion.